Honeybee, (Encarta image)Did evolution actually happen? Can it be proved?
As mentioned in a previous post, Americans, overwhelmingly, are believers in God, as a 2005 Gallup poll found out. Only 1 percent are sure God does not exist. Yet about 40% of Americans believe evolution is true. Moreover, most developed nations have even higher percentage of believers of evolution. (See chart below – courtesy of Avalon5.com). This is because evolution is taught in colleges and schools as if it is a fact, whereas discussion of “intelligent design” or “creationism” and God is excluded or even banned.
But has evolution been proved?
It appears that many people have taken for granted and assumed that evolution is a well-established fact. But nothing can be further from the truth
Let’s face it – if evolution is true, then the Bible claim that God made and fashioned all things (Eph.3:9,Col.1:16 and Rev.4:11), crumbles – and that would be reason for us to doubt the Bible and the very existence of God Himself. But how factual is evolution?
Let’s examine one of the more classic assertions about evolution. From a 6th Grade Science textbook we read:
In his book [The Origin of Species], Darwin explained that evolution occured by means of natural selection. Natural selection is the process by which individuals that are better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce than other members of the same species…Since food and other resources are limited, the offspring must compete with each other to survive… After many generations more members of the species will have the helpful trait. In effect the environment has “selected” organisms with helpful traits to be the parents of the next generation – hence the term”natural selection”. Over a long period of time, natural selection can lead to evolution. Helpful variations gradually accumulate in a species, while unfavorable one disappear.
For example, suppose a new fast-swimming predator moves into the turtles’ habitat. Turtles that are able to swim faster be more likely to escape from the new predator. The faster turtles would thus be more likely to survive and reproduce. Over time, more and more turtles in the species would have “fast-swimmer” trait.
(Science Explorer Grade 6, Teacher’s Edition, Tennessee Edition, (c) 2006 Prentice Hall, pp 118-119, emphasis theirs).
Here is a commonly accepted explanation for evolution. By natural selection, according to evolutionists, individuals that are better adapted to environment survive which, they say, explains development of new species. Okay, let’s check that assertion up with an ordinary creature, the common honeybee.
The tiny honeybee, smaller than your pinky [finger], you might not have realized, packs a lot of wonder. According to the theory of evolution there used to be no honeybees — that honeybees evolved from would-be-honeybees.
The World Book Encyclopedia, 1965 Edition, Volume 2 , page 154, says this about honeybees:
Honeybees are social insects. They live and work together in large groups. They form a colony, or group of thousands of bees…One worker can do little by itself, but many thousands of workers in a colony, working as a group, can do many things… Each colony includes three classes of honeybees (1) the queen, which lays eggs; (2) the workers, which gather food and care for the young and (3) the drone, which fertilize the queen. The honeybee colony is really a family home, where the workers provide food and shelter for the helpless young. The workers build the nest, collect and store honey, and do all kinds of housekeeping work. They guard the entrance to the nest against enemies. If necessary, they fight and die to protect the colony…
The queen honeybee lays eggs that hatch into thousands of workers. Laying eggs is the queen’s only job…The queen honeybee does not rule the colony, but she is the force that holds it together. The workers become excited and disorganized if she is not in the nest… The workers do all the chores in a honeybee colony, except lay eggs. All workers are females, like the queen, but they are smaller than the queen. The worker has long tongue for gathering nectar. It uses its hind legs to carry pollen…Drones, or male honeybees are burly, clumsy creatures. They do no work and have no sting. They are raised in cells a little larger than those used for worker bees. Drones develop from unfertilized eggs. The only function of a drone is to mate with a young queen. An unmated queen can lay only drone eggs. She must be fertilized in order to lay worker eggs.
The American Bee Journal further says:
The honey-bee colony consists of one queen, many thousand worker bees, and, at certain seasons, from a few to several thousand drone or male bees. It also includes a series of parallel honey combs made up of six-sided cells on both sides for the rearing of young bees (brood rearing) and for the storage of food-pollen and honey. The domicile to house these must be considered an element of the colony, since the colony would experience great difficulty in surviving without protection from the weather elements. Individual queens, workers, or drones cannot survive alone. Collectively, the bees of a colony cannot survive without combs for brood, honey, and pollen. [From the article "The Life of the Honey Bee", American Bee Journal (1967) Vol. 107, No. 12: 461-462,464]
Here is a dilemma for evolutionists. The honeybee colony is a complex, well organized group of highly specialized types of bees. The colony is vital to the survival of the individual bees. Each class in a colony is incapable of surviving and reproducing by itself. Each class needs the other. If there were only queen bees, or only drone bees before, how could they reproduce and perpetuate themselves? How could a drone survive if it did not have sting to protect itself from predators? How could the queen bee and the drone survive if worker bees did not provide food? If evolution is about survival, the more natural course is for each class to compete for whatever limited resources was available. But somehow these bees “decided” to cooperate with each other and contribute their unique skills for the common benefit of the members of the colony.
Does it make sense to say that the various classes of honeybees underwent a parallel evolution that equipped each of them to assume a unique role in an intricate interdependence that happened to fit well?
You see, it is unimaginable enough for one class of honeybee to have evolved and survived alone. But for three classes of honeybees to have evolved at the same time, each with a set of skills not good enough to survive alone – but enough, taken together, for the survival of the entire colony. It just simply stretch one’s imagination beyond limit.
In the first place how did each class of bees come to be? How did they survive before they formed a colony? Why not simply develop adaptive mechanism separately, individually instead of organizing into a colony which is an infinitely more complex route to take? Why not evolve into three separate, independent species?
The Lansing State Journal, July 30, 1997 article ”How do Bees Make Honey” further says:
Bees actually have two stomachs, their honey stomach which they use like a nectar backpack and their regular stomach. The honey stomach holds almost 70 mg of nectar and when full, it weighs almost as much as the bee does. Honeybees must visit between 100 and 1500 flowers in order to fill their honeystomachs.
The honeybees return to the hive and pass the nectar onto other worker bees. These bees suck the nectar from the honeybee’s stomach through their mouths. These “house bees” “chew” the nectar for about half an hour. During this time, enzymes are breaking the complex sugars in the nectar into simple sugars so that it is both more digestible for the bees and less likely to be attacked by bacteria while it is stored within the hive. The bees then spread the nectar throughout the honeycombs where water evaporates from it, making it a thicker syrup. The bees make the nectar dry even faster by fanning it with their wings. Once the honey is gooey enough, the bees seal off the cell of the honeycomb with a plug of wax. The honey is stored until it is eaten. In one year, a colony of bees eats between 120 and 200 pounds of honey.
If honeybees survived on one stomach, why the need for another stomach? Why would the honeybee get more nectar than they need and store it in the honey stomach? Why would they need to store the nectar in honeycomb and why make honeycomb when they already have a second stomach to store nectar?
Which make more sense – that these all happened accidentally or that an intelligent Creator created each class of honeybees, put them together and set their delicate interaction into motion?
We have only barely explored the complexity of the honeybee community. We have not even considered the intricate division of labor within the class of worker honeybees. We have not even explored how a honeybee whose eyesight is just good enough to see a meter away, can navigate its way to hundreds of flowers, many miles away and return home. And we have not explored the development of honeybee from egg to larva to pupa to adult honeybee, which itself is an even more complicated route for evolution to take.
Dr. Harold C. UreyHoneybees are just one of the many creatures that punch big holes at the theory of evolution. You just need to look around you and observe. Even ordinary creatures – their characteristics and behavior – can be so complex, evolution can hardly account for it. But evolutionists obviously don’t really bother because their mind seems already made up. In fact even the well respected physicist Dr.Harold C. Urey, a Nobel Prize recipient, admits:
All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel that it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did. [Harold C. Urey, quoted in Christian Science Monitor, January 4, 1962; p, 4]
That says it all. Evolution clearly is another religion, masqueraded as science. It has not been proved but is taken as fact.
On the other hand, God says that His creation, which include the honeybees are proof of His existence and power.
The more is known about even the simplest ordinary creatures, the more evolutionary loopholes are exposed. It seems God had designed certain creatures just to douse water on all excuses. The fact is the theory of evolution is nothing more than an excuse for taking God out of man’s consciousness.
